Spatially mapping of friendliness for human-robot interaction

It is important that robots interact with multiple people. However, most research has dealt with only interaction between one robot and one person and assumed that the distance between them does not change. This paper focuses on the spatial relationships between a robot and multiple people during interaction. Based on the distance between them, our robot selects appropriate functions to use. It does this using a method we developed for spatially mapping the "friendliness" of each space around the robot. The robot interacts with the highest friendliness spaces (people) selectively, thereby enabling interaction between the robot and multiple people. Our humanoid robot, SIG2 which the proposed method was implemented into, interacted with about 30 visitors, at the Kyoto University Museum. The results obtained using questionnaires after interaction showed that the actions of SIG2 were easy to understand even when it interacted with multiple people at the same time and that SIG2 behaved in a friendly manner.